The OpenStack community that helped create the Kilo release has done some seriously heavy lifting.

For the 11th release, there were more contributors, more companies involved and more work across time zones than ever before.

Some 1,500 developers put their weight behind Kilo, merging over 19,500 patches, dispatching with nearly 14,000 tickets and exchanging more than 20,000 emails. The total number of contributors increased 5 percent over the previous release, with core contributors staying stable at around 200. This latest release, however, bulked up the number of casual developers by 13 percent.

“It usually happens that a very small number contributors are responsible for 80 percent of the code,” says Stefano Maffulli, developer advocate at the OpenStack Foundation. “What makes OpenStack unique is the large number of people who are responsible for the remaining 20 percent. We’re attracting and retaining a large number of new contributors even if they make small and infrequent patches or fix bugs.”

Those contributors added heft to this release from around the world. A timezone analysis reveals a “continuous development community,” says Daniel Izquierdo Cortázar, chief data officer at Bitergia which maintains the OpenStack Activity Board.
There are three main hubs of activity, he notes: the U.S., Europe and Africa, and Asia, creating a hive of development that never sleeps.